


Besieged

by unwindmyself



Series: curious shapes shift in the dark [42]
Category: True Blood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Attempted Fridging, Attempted Murder, F/F, F/M, Female Friendship, Fix-It, Gen, Mind Control, Minor Character Death, Monologue, Team Dynamics, Vampire Family, Violence, Women Being Awesome, agency and choices!, canon-typical bigotry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-17
Updated: 2014-05-17
Packaged: 2018-01-25 10:58:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1646192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unwindmyself/pseuds/unwindmyself
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The vampires (and their allies) make a final showdown at vamp camp.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Besieged

**Author's Note:**

> Part five, "The Switch and the Spur."

“You’re –”

Pam dashes behind the startled guard, holds him still while Eric grabs his walkie-talkie and Willa locks eyes with him, entering into a glamour.

“I’m Vivienne Avery,” Willa says very firmly.  “I’m twenty-two, I was born in Alabama, and people always say I look like someone but they can never say who.  Just one of those faces.”

“We don’t need the whole character sketch, sis,” Pam points out.

“Point is,” Willa continues, “I’m nobody you need to worry about.  None of us are.  We’re just here as part of our boss Dr. Sawyer’s entourage, and he’s here to meet with the governor.”

“Okay,” the man says.  “Go on in.”

“Much obliged,” Eric nods, all predatory-polite smile.  He turns to Sam and hands him another of the walkie-talkies they’ve picked up along the way, saying, “You stand guard and if you hear anything, just do one of your little transformations and head out to warn the others.”

“Little transformations,” Sam repeats incredulously.

“You know what I mean,” Eric shrugs.  “You can teach us all the proper vocabulary later, but for now…”

“Yeah, I got it,” Sam says, just the slightest bit miffed.  He clips the walkie-talkie to his belt loop and waves at the others to head inside, and with Eric in the lead and Jason following behind they do just that.

Nobody’s at all surprised when their entrance is met with a chorus of “what the hell?” and “who the fuck are you?” from the governor and Sarah Newlin both.

“Who let you in?” the governor roars in the general direction of the door.

Instead of answering the question, Willa chooses this moment to push forward from behind the two older vampires, both whose fangs are dropped, and stare her human father down.  “Hi, Daddy,” she says, and yeah, she’s sort of regretting the monotone the second she uses it (it sounds like a bad horror movie) but whatever, it’s done and out there.

“Oh my god,” Governor Burrell breathes out, stepping forward and reaching to cup her cheek.  “Where have you been?  Have these monsters hurt you?”

Willa shrugs, having to make an effort not to flinch.  “Don’t say that,” she mumbles.

“Why?” he laughs.  “That’s what they are.  Monsters.  They’re aberrations, they’re demons.”

She can feel her new family getting closer and closer to going on the defensive, and all she can think to do is roll her eyes and let her own fangs drop as well.  It doesn’t shock her when her human father physically recoils, jumping back a good two feet in horror.

“What did they do to you?” he asks.

“I think it’s pretty obvious what they did,” Sarah calls out, rising from her chair and crossing her arms.  “They killed her and made her one of their freak kind, just like they did to my loser ex-husband.”

“ _So_ nice to see you again, Sarah,” Jason drawls, taking his turn to move forward and indeed right behind her, lifting his gun but not yet pointing it at her.

“Jason?” Sarah yelps.  “What the hell are you doing here?”

“You know him?” the governor asks.

“He was at Fellowship camp,” Sarah says, waving a hand in the dismissive universal gesture for _there’s more to that story but I’m sure as hell not going to tell right now._

And of course Governor Burrell reads into that, but it’s not the time to react, not when he’s got his own flesh standing in front of him having been given someone else’s blood and he can be chauvinistically territorial over _her_. Instead, he steps closer – not as close as before, but close _r_.

“Baby, you just talk to me,” he says, his voice as even as a Sunday morning kids’ show. “You tell me who did this and we’ll take care of him for you, stay with me and it’ll all be okay. I’ve got people working to fix this, and we can fix you.”

“I’m not broken, _Daddy_ ,” Willa retorts, genuine fire flashing in her eyes. It’s rather clear to Eric and Pam both that she’s getting a few things off her chest that have been there since long before this gubernatorial mess began. “It may shock you, but I asked for this. I wanted it. And I _like it_. I like knowin’ that I can do what I want, I can do _who_ I want if I feel like it, and I don’t hardly have to answer to anyone.”

The governor makes a face. “Willa,” he cautions, “calm down, you don’t mean it.”

“I do mean it,” she shouts. “You know how hard it is livin’ with you? Your control-freak attitude and your disdain for anything you don’t understand? I’ve gotta newsflash for you, too: just ‘cause I’m a vampire doesn’t mean I suddenly wanna go out and murder everyone. If you took your head out of your ass, you’d see there’s plenty of vampires who are still willin’ to try to coexist. It’s not like because you’re one thing, you gotta be the other.”

She looks ready to continue, but the door bursts open and one of the security guards that nobody had found and glamoured bursts in. “Governor!” he shouts. “Ms. Newlin! There’s been a security breach.”

Sarah rolls her eyes around the room, at the human with a gun in her general direction and the three vampires in front of the governor. “We know there’s been a breach, dumbass.”

The guard pulls a face, like he’s embarrassed but he doesn’t want to say so, and instead he turns and double-takes at Willa. “Sir, I thought your daughter was dead,” he says to the governor.

Willa flashes a smile full of fang. “Technically, I am.”

“Why the fuck are we still talking?” Sarah exclaims exasperatedly.

Another guard runs through the door, opening it wider so his comrades can follow. “Sir,” he says. “We’ve caught the other intruders.”

And sure enough, one of the men who’s following has his left arm around Nora’s waist and the ends of a silver chain that’s wrapped around her throat in his right hand; the other is holding silver chains that are wrapped like makeshift handcuffs around Tara’s and Jessica’s wrists and dragging them along. All three of the women are in various states of obvious pain: tears are streaming down Jessica’s face and starting to well in Tara’s eyes too; Nora is still managing to paw at her captor, making these soft little angry sounds, but her expression is reading exhaustion.

Immediately, of course, Eric’s eyes go wide and he clenches his fist, searches desperately for Nora’s eyes. His sister is _strong_ , he knows that, she’s hundreds of years old and she’s withstood who knows how much torture before, he knows that she can manage this, it can’t be as bad as all that.

Pam frantically sizes Tara up, looks her over for evidence of what these fuckers might have done to her, watches her grit her teeth and try to keep from moaning with the pain. Tara is one of the most badass vampires she’s known, despite still being a baby, so she knows that Tara can handle it.

In spite of himself, Jason’s eyes are trained on Jessica. Despite sharing the car on the way over, they still haven’t really even talked since that night at the Authority. They especially haven’t talked about things since he got the racism magicks blasted out of him this afternoon. But even though he’s not sure how he feels about her feels about her (he’s not really sure he’s cut out to be feeling any way about anyone right now, to be honest) he still knows that he cares about her enough to not wanna see her hurt like this. But she’s tough, right? She’s a vampire, she can totally deal with this kinda bullshit.

And Willa? She’s just glancing from Nora to Tara to Jessica and back and thinking of all the ways she’s going to contradict what she just told her human dad and kill anyone who hurt them.

“The prisoners were let out,” the head guard says almost sheepishly.

“They were _what_?” Governor Burrell shrieks.

“But it was these three who were responsible,” another guard takes over. “Figured if we could get them to talk we’d be able to get down to it.”

“Just fucking kill them! Kill all of them!” Sarah shouts, her voice going shrill as she waves her hand around to all of the vampires. “They’re vampires, _we kill vampires_ , and they’re criminals, they trespassed on the property, I’m pretty sure even if they were humans we’d be allowed to shoot them in self-defense and, going back to point one, _they’re vampires_. They don’t have the same rights a human would. Remember? That’s sort of why we’re here.”

“I can’t believe I ever slept with a lunatic like you,” Jason mutters under his breath, soft enough that nobody but the vampires hears it. (He knows that they did, because Willa actually turns to him with the most disgusted expression on her face. The fact that Sookie’s brother and her human dad have slept with the same woman is just too weird for her to handle.)

“So should we question them, then kill them?” the guard who’s got Nora asks, tightening the chain around her throat and coercing a stifled whimper from her.

“Well, just sayin’, that’s a pretty shitty plan,” Jason pipes up. “I mean, I don’t think any of us are gonna talk if we know that’s the only thing waitin’ for us. Pretty standard cop school information.”

“Shut up,” the guard grumbles, assuming he’s just being made fun of (which of course he is, but not exactly like he thinks).

“I don’t care,” Sarah says, “just _do it_.”

“Now wait a minute,” Governor Burrell exclaims. “We don’t need to be so hasty. That’s my daughter we’re talking about.”

“That’s not your daughter, that’s a trampy vamp bitch with your daughter’s face!” Sarah hisses. “She didn’t want any part of you anymore. She led her evil gang here to ruin everything you’ve worked for. To kill you, I bet.”

The governor falters, glancing from Willa to Sarah to Willa again.

“Kill them,” Sarah repeats, venom in her voice.

Pam is grinding her teeth. Jason is stroking his thumb across his gun. Eric is whispering “ _Jag älskar_ _dig, syster, som jag har älskat någonting annat här i livet_.” Willa is watching in terror.

The smart thing to do, perhaps, would be for one of the guards who’s not currently holding any of the women still to do the executions, but that’s not what happens. While the guard who’s got Tara and Jessica passes Tara’s chains off to one of the others, Tara takes the moment to kick the supposed recipient to the ground and let the chains fall to the floor, and because he’d been part of trying to kill them, she feels no shame reaching for his gun and using it on him in two seconds flat.

Inspired by this, Jessica turns to knee the guard who’s got her square in the crotch, then when he drops the chain around her wrist she whirls around and snaps his neck elegantly as she’d seen Nora do earlier. Nora herself works up the appropriate force to pry the guard’s arm from around her and with a wail as she takes hold of the chain around her throat, she wraps it around his instead and _yanks_ , strangling him.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Sarah yells, and she reaches for the first gun she can find. Instantly, Jason’s is raised to point at her skull, but hers is aimed at Willa’s heart.

“I can’t let you do that, Sarah,” Governor Burrell says quietly.

“Then what?” she retorts. “Can I shoot one of the other little _shits_ who’s managed to get past your security? Oh, it’s foolproof, you said. Nobody was gonna question _you_. Why, they’d be thanking you if they knew what you were doing. _Maybe_ ,” she adds, whirling around to face Jason, “it would be okay if I shot this idiot here?”

Jason doesn’t hesitate, he pulls the trigger once and twice and just like that Sarah’s body crumples to the floor. This time, he _knew_ she had a gun. He’ll worry about feeling bad about it later, but right now he’s ducking over to join Jessica and Tara and Pam, the latter of whom is shielding the former two protectively.

Now it’s just the governor and one guard left standing, and after Eric nudges Willa in the direction of his sister, her aunt, and she obliges, tutting as she looks over the still quickly-healing burns on the skin of Nora’s throat, he turns to the humans and actually outright _growls_.

“You know the plan, Dunbar,” the governor says to the man.

“I do,” he says. “It was an honor, sir.” And with military precision, he shoots the governor in the head, then himself, leaving the vampires and Jason all standing there wide-eyed amidst the carnage.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Jag älskar dig, syster, som jag har älskat någonting annat här i livet_ ; "I love you, sister, like I've loved nothing else in this life"


End file.
